The earth is not a planet. This is the strange denial that runs through a good deal of ecological thinking and, more generally, culturally dominant representations of the earth. I use the term denial in the Freudian sense of Verneinung to designate an unconscious knowledge that recognizes what it denies through the very act of negation. This denial can translate as follows: Obscurely, I know very well that the earth is a planet among other planets in the universe, but I am nevertheless going to represent it quite differently, in terms that negate the planetary dimension of the earth, erasing its cosmological inscription in order to make it incomparable, so that it refers only to its own conditions of existence. I will call it Gaia, a critical zone, ecosystem of ecosystems, but also a technosphere, a mediasphere, and even a world or globe, unless I decide to call it, like...

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